Donna Tomlin, a photographer in Tennessee, responded to my call for photographers to send in their tips and tricks in my Who Knows Anything Anyway post. She sent in her tips and instructions on applying textures to a photograph to make photographic art! Donna has produced some amazing photographs using this technique, and she is sharing her steps. If you would like to see more of Donna’s texture work, you can visit her flickr at www.flickr.com/photos/donnaree/.
I am a huge fan of Donna’s! She puts out some amazing photographs. Most photographers specialize in one area of photography or another, but not her! She is simply amazing at portrait work, macro, landscape, EVERYTHING! Please check out her work, and I hope you enjoy this tutorial!
Thanks Donna for sharing this!
Texture Art
Applying textures can transform some of the most boring shots you have into a work of art. The steps to apply a textures can be very simple to being as complex as you want.
Helpful hints to keep in mind along the way.
- Always apply your texture to the background photo
- Use only high res textures. (example) using a 72 res texture and applying it to a 300 res background photo, will decrease the quality of your original photo.
- YES! You can apply more than 1 texture to a photo.
The steps to applying a texture is as simple as dragging and dropping. Where you go after that is wherever your artistic imagination carries you.
Basic Steps:
- Open your background pic that you want to work on
- Open a texture file that you think will suit the background (hint) after opening your texture you can apply a new adjustment layer, choose hue and saturation, use the sliders to adjust the hue or sat of the texture to better match the tone of your background photo.
3. Using the “move” tool, click and drag your texture picture over to the open background photo. (ctrl+t) Resize the texture to fit your background picture. Double click the texture to apply or you can click the ? at the top of the page.
4. With your texture highlighted in the layers palette window, select a blending mode such as screen, overlay, hard light. Adjust your opacity to something that pleases you.
5. Add a layer mask to the texture layer. Select a soft brush, lower the opacity of the brush to around 50% . Make sure your color for this brush is set to black and “paint” over the areas that you wish to remove texture from. If you erase to much of the texture, simply change your color to white and “paint” your texture back in.
At this point your can add more textures following the steps above or your can “flatten” your work of art and print to hang on your wall.
A great little tip for erasing texture from your image is to normally pick a part of your photo that you wish to draw this eye to. And if applying to portraits. I almost always never leave texture applied to the face.
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